


I have conjured you (for my bidding)

by SafelyCapricious



Series: ain't no grave can hold my body down [25]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, F/M, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Possibly Unrequited Love, Unreliable Narrator, lots of things going on in the background, mostly - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:22:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27203779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SafelyCapricious/pseuds/SafelyCapricious
Summary: Sakura is born with a shock of white hair, eyes so pale they look translucent, and what looks like a smear of ink down her side.By the time she’s a week old, her eyes are a light green and all of her hair has fallen out. The ink smear remains.After a month her eyes have darkened to a bright green that makes her mother coo “where’s my green eyed girl?” at her and she’s got a soft layer of fuzzy pink hair growing in. If the ink smear has changed, no one has noticed.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura & Yamanaka Ino, Haruno Sakura/Namikaze Minato
Series: ain't no grave can hold my body down [25]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1950148
Comments: 11
Kudos: 213





	I have conjured you (for my bidding)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [powderblew](https://archiveofourown.org/users/powderblew/gifts).



> Title from Witch by The Bird and The Bee
> 
> Dedicated to Sonia b/c she was the one who told me to do a soulmate fic
> 
> So she's to blame
> 
> Day 25 of fictober, this one is theoretically for puppet.

Sakura is born with a shock of white hair, eyes so pale they look translucent, and what looks like a smear of ink down her side.

By the time she’s a week old, her eyes are a light green and all of her hair has fallen out. The ink smear remains.

After a month her eyes have darkened to a bright green that makes her mother coo “where’s my green eyed girl?” at her and she’s got a soft layer of fuzzy pink hair growing in. If the ink smear has changed, no one has noticed.

“It’s a birthmark,” her parents tell her, when she’s old enough to ask, and she’s satisfied.

They tell her it’s a birthmark because it has to be — civilians don’t _have_ soulmarks, and ninja only get them when they’re older (if they’re going to get one at all) once their chakra has fully stabilized.

And if they watch it, when she’s young, and try to decide if it looks like it’s getting any clearer — like it might be words or a picture and not just a dark smear of ink — well, they never tell her and it never changes enough for them to worry.

It’s just a birthmark to her — even once she decides to be a ninja, even when she starts daydreaming of the day she’ll get Sasuke-kun’s soul mark and Ini-pig will have to cry herself to sleep. No one has soulmarks when they’re born — everyone knows that — because babies don’t have _any_ chakra control and you have to have _some_ chakra control in order to have a soulmark.

So she doesn’t ever really look at it or think about it — and maybe she’s a little bit self conscious about the mark on her body, so she buys tops that cover the two inches below her left breast always (and sometimes she just winds her bindings a little lower as well) — she’s always been more modest than Ino-pig-everyone-look-at-my-stomach-Yamanaka anyways.

She manages to keep that sense of modesty until the world goes to hell.

And then she kind of doesn’t care about that sort of thing for a while, far too busy trying to _survive._

And then they drag the world back from hell but her modesty gets left somewhere on the wayside — maybe because she’s managed to punch a goddess in the face? (Hell yeah!)

So when, on a clear spring day, after helping the boys wrestle Kakashi’s pack into baths, she realizes that her top is completely covered in dog drool and hair and mud, she takes the whole thing off and heads towards one of the few buckets of still clean water.

“For fucks sake,” she says, as she uses the hose to try to rinse off the worst of the mess, as Naruto dramatically throws his hands up in the air and ‘faints’ at the sight of her in breast wraps. He only has a second to lie there and giggle before the dogs sense a downed opponent and he’s covered in furry wiggling bodies.

“Is this a mating ritual I am unaware of?” Sai asks, blinking at her mildly, as he tugs on the sleeve of his shirt like he’s wondering if he should be taking his off too.

She snorts and drops her shirt into the bucket. “Yes, Sai,” she says, flatly, and holds a hand up to her forehead, even as she uses the other hand to swish her shirt around in the water. “Take me, I’m yours.”

“Where am I supposed to take you?” he asks, and she mentally fist pumps at the ghost of a real smile that’s dancing around the corners of his mouth.

“I dunno, lunch?” she asks, checking the sun in the sky. Washing the dogs always takes much longer than she thinks it should.

“Do I want to know what’s going…” Kakashi, rounding the side of the house — having had to go and change his mask after an incident that actually _wasn’t_ planned — freezes and gapes at her — or at her breasts.

“Oh for fucks —“ she starts, even as she starts to self consciously cross her arms — because really, Kakashi who walks around with his nose in a _porn book_ all day should not be judging her when she’s in totally reasonable breast bindings. But then Kakashi is there with a hand wrapped around her wrist and he’s crouched down staring at — “Pervert!” she says and tries to punch him — but she’s been playful and she thinks he is too but he’s _not._

He catches her other hand and demands, voice hard: “What is this?” and she stops fighting him for a moment and tries to figure out just what the hell is happening. Dimly she can hear Naruto trying to get out from under the puppy pile to figure out what’s going on.

“It’s a tattoo,” Sai says, leaning down next to Kakashi and poking the skin under her breast.

Which, oh, obviously. She rolls her eyes at the both of them and huffs out a breath, “It’s just a birthmark, Kakashi.” He lets go of her wrists, finally, and she plants her hands on her hips.

“No,” he says, and there’s something odd about his voice, and she’s trying to peer down at him but he’s still staring fixedly at her birthmark. “It’s not.”

And then his hands are flashing through handsets and he’s placing his palm over the mark and — painpainPAIN — she lashes out, for real, and the flies into the corpse of trees at the edge of the property as she gathers healing chakra and presses it into whatever the hell he just did, trying to figure out what the hell is going on, and her scan is saying there’s nothing wrong with her but it _hurts_ , and it’s absorbing the healing chakra like it’s _thirsty_ and the air kind of shimmers in front of her and her blood is rushing in her ears and —

There’s a body pinning her to the ground — dead weight — and wearing a flak jacket and at first she thinks Kakashi but no, the hair is blond and Naruto doesn’t wear a flak jacket but then she sees the blood and the _gaping_ wound and she stops caring about who it is and starts to heal and there are other noises but nothing else seems able to draw her focus even though she should be able to heal this whoever and be aware of her surroundings but —

The wound closes just as blackness drags her under.

***

“What. The. Fuck.” Is the first thing Sakura hears when her awareness floats back into her body.

“Kakashi’s fault,” Sakura says, and starts by trying to move her fingers before doing anything else. Even with Tsunade at her bedside, which means she’s _fine_ , she knows she’ll get an awful lecture if she doesn’t follow protocol for waking up somewhere other than where she passed out. “He just attacked me — and I _know_ ,” she says, checking her own chakra levels — lower than they should be, probably why she’s here — and then running the lightest diagnostic, “‘a good ninja is always prepared for an attack,’” she heals a few pulled muscles that would’ve probably healed on their own but slowed her down for a while, “but I don’t _want_ to be a paranoid old bastard like him.”

Tsunade still hasn’t said anything, and when Sakura looks her mentor is just sitting there with slightly narrowed eyes, watching her. But not interrupting, which is weird.

Sakura mentally shrugs — because it’s impossible to manage a not awkward shrug while laying flat on a hospital bed — and starts to carefully maneuver into a sitting position so she can get at the water that was left at her bedside. “And also I am going to kill him.”

Tsunade stays silent as Sakura carefully pours a glass of water — her hands aren’t shaking at all which is a good sign. “And how long have you had your soulmark?” Tsunade asks, and Sakura proceeds to spill the entire glass of water on herself.

***

“What do you mean, that was the Yondaime who appeared?” Sakura asks, well aware she sounds hysterical — and fairly okay with that fact since she _feels_ hysterical. “He’s _dead_ , we fought with his reanimated corpse!”

Tsunade shrugs, which is a bad sign. The fact that she hasn’t even reached for any sake is a worse sign. “It’s him — we ran all the blood tests we could — and he’s in the outfit he died in, seems like the wound you healed was the one that killed him.”

“What about,” Sakura says, and she wishes that Tsunade would pull out the sake so _she_ could have some, “what if it’s just like a clone or something, like what Orochimaru was doing? Couldn’t that be what is happening here?”

“Sakura,” Tsunade says, and when her mentor uses that voice Sakura knows better than to argue, so she just collapses back into the uncomfortable mattress and puts her hands over her face.

She doesn’t _want_ to have a soulmate — no really. Sure when she was a kid it seemed all romantic but now it’s — and she pulled him from _dying_ which is just, what and he’s _Naruto’s dad_.

She grabs a pillow to scream into, just a little, and Tsunade does her the service of not commenting.

“How is he?” she asks, finally, because she doesn’t have anything else to say.

Tsunade pauses, in a way that never means anything good. “He’s…healthy.”

“But?” Sakura prompts, sitting up again.

“He’s not waking up.” Tsunade stands. “Get changed and maybe you can see if we missed something. He’s in room Eight-C”

Sakura scoffs — the thought of Tsunade missing something is just…just ridiculous. But some part of her does want to see him, so she take the moment to put on the clothes that have been left for her — her own, thankfully. At some point she should probably stop leaving things at the hospital, but it does continue to be useful to virtually have an entire wardrobe to work with, when needed.

The walk from her room to his is short, and when she gets there Tsunade is reading the chart and frowning down at the still man. Movement at the window makes Sakura scowl — Kakashi.

She’s smart enough to realize that he must have recognized the Fourth in her mark somehow (she’s still not able to think of it as a soulmark, but it’s apparently not a birthmark, so for now just mark will have to do) but he still could’ve _talked_ to her instead of doing whatever the hell he had done.

The Fourth — Naruto’s dad — Minato Namikaze — is very still on the bed. He looks like Naruto, quite a bit. Or maybe, more accurately, Naruto looks like him. But he’s still a strange ninja just lying there and there’s no reason she should have the almost compulsive urge to smooth the hair back from his forehead.

And yet.

She doesn’t. Because as lax as Tsunade is on bedside manner, bedside harassment is a whole other thing and petting an injured shinobi has never ended well for anyone in the history of time.

She carefully takes the seat that’s by the bed, ignoring the fact that it’s still warm. Kakashi, she’s assuming. Coward, she thinks and scowls at the window even though she can’t see him there anymore.

Her chakra levels are still low, but she’s done more with less. “You’re not going to give me the chart until I do my own scan, are you?” she asks, rhetorically, and her only answer is Tsunade’s snort. “Right,” she says to herself and then carefully gathers her chakra and reaches out.

The man goes from prone to lunging with chakra lighting his hands in an instant — and Sakura finds herself pushed back behind Tsunade and several feet back by the wall again. Kakashi is between her and Minato as well, and mixed in with her annoyance that they feel the need to protect her is a bit of warmth that they care enough to protect her.

“Kushina!” Minato is wailing, and the warmth quickly turns to dead coals in her heart at his grief — she hadn’t thought about it but if she brought him from when he was dying — when he was dying with his _wife,_ the love of his life — and she hadn’t —

Oh no. Could she have brought them both back? Did she fail somehow — and even if she couldn’t have, did it matter? He’d lost the one he loved and what are soulmates to a wife and a child and the willingness to _die_ for someone you love and —

Sakura clamps a hand to her mouth to keep the whimpers in, even as Kakashi steps forward and starts murmuring and she can see wild blue eyes focus on her sensei and then the two men are holding each other and the sobs —

Oh the sobs break her heart.

Tsunade guides her out of the room without a word.

***

“Why are you moping?” Sai asks, and she spears the cherry tomato that had been resistant to her chopsticks.

“I’m not moping,” she says, and offers Sai a wide grin around partially chewed salad.

“Ugh, gross Forehead,” Ino drags a chair from a nearby table and settles into it artfully.

Sakura makes a face and takes another big bite of salad so she doesn’t have to talk. Because she loves Ino, she does, but she doesn’t love Ino interrupting her standing lunch date with Sai. (She tries not to think about why she’s being so possessive of the time with her boys right now — because it’s stupid to dwell on it and it’s stupid to be upset and it’s stupid stupid stupid.)

“If you don’t like it,” Sakura says, after she’s finished chewing and choked back the first seven awful things she wanted to say, “you can just go. You weren’t invited anyways.”

“Nonsense,” says Ino, tossing her hair and fluttering her eyelashes at Sai. “I’m always wanted.”

Shoving another bunch of salad in her mouth seems like a better idea than anything she could possibly say, so she does that while Ino obnoxiously waves over the waiter and orders two deserts.

“Such a pig,” Sakura says, well aware that it’s halfhearted at best.

Ino’s eyes narrow and Sakura shoves another overly large bite of salad into her mouth. Unfortunately it’s the last of her salad and now she doesn’t know what she’s going to do — she’s been avoiding Ino since she’d been let out of the hospital. Now it seems like her avoidance is at an end.

Which — she shouldn’t have avoided her in the first place. But she really doesn’t want to do this here. And maybe Ino can read that in her face, because after a moment she swears and trots after the waiter.

Within moments she’s back, a white plastic bag over her wrist and a grin on her face as she plants herself by Sakura’s seat. “I paid. You’re welcome. Let’s go.”

Sai has pulled out a notebook and, ugh, seems to be taking notes about them again. “You’re going to get hit again,” Sakura points out, a little too annoyed to be kind, “if you try to use me and Ino as some guide for how friends behave, you know.”

He bares his teeth at her, in what someone might call a smile but most definitely isn’t. “I know. You were the last one to hit me.”

“Pah,” says Ino, fluffing her bangs, “no one but me and Forehead can be this fabulous, you shouldn’t even try.”

And now Sakura is back to wanting to cry. She accepts the arm looped through hers as soon as she’s standing, and the fact that Ino is definitely dragging her somewhere and she really doesn’t have a choice but to go.

***

“It’s an easy smash and grab,” Kakashi says, eyes crinkled in a theoretical smile.

Sakura hasn’t spoken to him since he activated her mark, or whatever he did. She thought maybe he’d search her out to explain or, or something.

But no.

For a moment when she got the summons she thought, for sure, that he was calling her up to the Hokage office to have a word with her somewhere she couldn’t hit him. But it seems like she was wrong about that.

She thinks how he’s treating her might hurt more than knowing that her soulmate is never going to want her.

Her whole life had been a series of learning the lesson that she’s always going to be second best in any romantic way — but she thought she’d finally got where everyone respected what she could do as a ninja — as a teammate.

Apparently she was wrong.

At least he’s sending her to smash — “Sakura, we’ve gotten a few poisoning cases out of that area recently — nothing unusual, but I think they might be working up to something — don’t engage unless you have to so you can deal with it if it comes up.”

She forces herself to smile and be glad Sai isn’t going on the mission with her as he’d definitely comment on it — and she’d probably hit him.

Maybe, she thinks, as she turns away and tries to actually smile at her team for this mission — it’s not their fault her feelings are bruised, after all — she should invest in some sort of face covering so she can stop having to smile all the time. The thought of donning something like that awful swirling orange mask with the single eye hole is amusing enough that she manages a real smile for her team as they split to grab their packs before heading out.

***

“What do you mean, you haven’t even spoken to him?” Ino does not have an inside voice — but at least they are inside, Sakura thinks as she choses to just lay down on the floor.

Her hand hits an empty bottle that rolls under the futon — and when she looks to make sure it’s really empty she sees that bra she’s been missing for _ages_ and she tries to figure out how it possibly could’ve gotten there.

“Oi!” Ino catches herself on the coffee table as she leans over to peer into her friend’s face, “answer me!”

“I mean,” Sakura says, turning her head away from contemplating the bra (maybe when she was unpacking from the hot spring mission?) “that I haven’t spoken to him.”

“But — but he’s your _soulmate_!” Ino wails, and Sakura curses the fact that she let them get to this level of drunkenness and also that she has nosey ninja neighbors.

“Ugh, shut up, shut up,” she says, scrambling off the floor before tackling Ino and covering her mouth with her hands, “learn some damn volume control won’t you? It’s a secret you moron.”

Sakura can’t understand what Ino says next — muffled as it is by her hands — but it seems at least mostly softer. And then, of course, she’s being _licked_ and she just stares down at her. “Really? You think that’s going to freak me out? You do remember who my teammates are, don’t you?”

Ino’s eyes narrow — and then she’s reaching out and _tickling_ , that bitch.

“He doesn’t want me,” Sakura tells Ino, later, after a broken coffee table had finally ended the tickle fight.

“Then he’s an idiot — though with a son like Naruto I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise,” Ino hugs her to her side and smooths her hair back.

“Be nice about Naruto, he’s my teammate,” Sakura says and lets herself go limp in her best friend’s hold, “only I’m allowed to call him a moron.”

Ino scoffs at her, but doesn’t comment when Sakura starts to cry onto her shoulder.

***

“He was supposed to be back three days ago — or to at least check in. He hasn’t.” Kakashi briefs her, grim, and Sakura rubs absently at her chest.

“I didn’t know he was being sent out on missions,” she says, after a long moment where no one else has said anything, glancing at Naruto who is vibrating with some strong emotion next to her. Of course she didn’t know anything about him, she reminds herself, because he’s been avoiding her because he doesn’t want her because she stole him away from holding his wife, who he loved, while she died.

Kakashi just nods, like her statement is a good point and not just nervous babble. “It’s classified.”

“What…why am I here, Hokage?” she asks, when no more information is forthcoming and no one else speaks. She’s not ANBU, she’s been banished from the mission desk because of overtaxing herself — or that was what she was told — and she doesn’t have clearance for classified information anymore, apparently.

And Kakashi hasn’t spoken to her outside of mission parameters since he activated her mark.

“Your…mark,” he says, carefully, and she winces, forcing herself not to cover the mark at her side that’s covered with fabric anyways, “you summoned him to you once before, I want to try to do it again.”

She grits her teeth — it had _hurt_ when he’s forced his chakra into her system and — “Show me the hand seals,” she says, briskly, because it doesn’t matter how she feels about anything, she knows her duty and she’ll do it.

And she has just stocked up on both alcohol and ice cream, even if she hadn’t been planning to eat it all in one sitting she can do that.

Kakashi shows her the hand signs, and she runs through it three times until she’s confident she has it, before turning away from him, pulling her shirt up and tucking it up so she can access her side. It’s not that she thinks anyone is going to be leering at her — Ino regularly shows more skin — it’s just that the whole thing hurts and she’s feeling vulnerable and she wants a second to herself.

“Alright,” she says softly, before going through the seals with chakra then setting a palm against her ribs and —

She feels like a puppet being pulled by strings and for half a second she thinks she’s going to be pulled into a million pieces before she lands on dirt in the dark. “Fuck,” she breathes — and it feels like all of her bones are realigning and —

There’s a groan from her left, and she still can’t see anything but she has her pouch and after a second has a lit match and —

“Fuck,” she says with more feeling, rushing over to the prone form and immediately placing her hands on him, already glowing green, as her energy rushes to stop the bleeding that she saw from that scarce moment of light and — it’s not just bleeding but broken bones as well and —

She really wishes she’d summoned him to her instead of the other way around, because this is going to wipe her out and she doesn’t know who did this to him or where they are or — “You’ve got to wake up, Minato, I need you to wake up and talk to me. Please be okay.”

He’s easier to heal then she thinks he should be, and she’s not sure if that’s just the adrenaline talking — it has been a while since she’s had to heal things to this extent outside of the hospital — or if it’s some aspect of being soulmates, resented though she clearly is.

“Wha—sit?” he mumbles as she stitches the last of his finger bones back together and she wants to cry. Though that might be the chakra exhaustion.

“S’ry,” she slurs as the glow around her hands sputters then goes dark, and in the dark up and down become meaningless and she finds herself back on the dirt again. “C’n’t d’more.”

She thinks he maybe says something else, but the darkness has folded itself behind her eyelids and she really didn’t want collapsing from chakra exhaustion to be something she picked up from her first teacher, and yet here she is.

***

There’s beeping when she swims back up to consciousness, and she already knows she must be in the hospital because she can smell the sterilant they use in the hospital rooms. Her fingers find the edge of the blanket and yeah, she’s definitely in the Konoha hospital.

“Stop pretending to sleep,” Tsunade’s voice is the final confirmation that allows Sakura to force her eyes open.

“What —“ remembering where she’d been when she’d passed out she tries to sit up suddenly and the world lurches around her and Tsunade is there, catching her shoulders and pressing her back into the mattress. “Is he okay? How did we get back?” Sakura grasps at Tsunade’s wrists, frantic with worry.

“He got you back, once you healed him he was able to bring you both back. He’s got some new scars but is still alive, and you’re on bed rest for chakra exhaustion. You know better than that.” Tsunade’s voice is hard and harsh — and in it Sakura can hear all the worry that her mentor must have felt.

“Sorry — I didn’t — I wasn’t expecting to be the one making the jump,” she defends, weakly. She probably should’ve saved more of her charka, what if he hadn’t been able to fight and — fuck, Tsunade was going to make her regret such a mistake.

“Well, I’m glad you did,” comes a voice she has never heard calm, and her gaze jerks away from Tsunade to just behind her where the Fourth is standing, hands shoved in his pocket and a small smile on his face. “You saved my life.” He seems to consider her, and she wonders if she should apologize. “Twice.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, because she knows he doesn’t want her and —

“I’m not,” he says, and then he’s unclasping her grip on Tsunade and taking her hand and sitting down in the chair by her bedside and — “I think we got off on the wrong foot. It’s nice to meet you, Sakura, I’m Minato.”

“Oh,” she blinks, and Tsunade is scoffing and walking out the door and — “Nice to meet you?” she tries and his grin is really bright and her heart is lurching in her chest and — yeah that beeping is definitely attached to her, how embarrassing.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been getting so much love today for my Naruto fics and I want to just give all of you all of the hugs. You all are the best.
> 
> I hope this was okay. I wanted to do more with it, but then fictober so, this is what we have because I need to go to sleep.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed!
> 
> I can be found on tumblr as safelycapricious (main blog) or capriciouswrites (writing blog)


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